Betty's Utility Room

Regular readers, i.e., me, and I'm more inclined to read my Statcounter than my own blog, will be disgruntled to learn that the Sky Plus box has wiped all our recordings again, to coincide with Film Four becoming a free service. We'd got Lost In Translation and some Marx Brothers films on there along with a couple of films from ages ago which I never got around to seeing.

It's our own fault for never watching anything in real time before. Seriously though, how am I supposed to sit through a film that's on at two in the morning?

Anyway, one of the programmes we recorded and did see was Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. This is a new series after some pilot shows which we watched a few months ago.

I like Charlie Brooker's writing in the Grauniad. It is like a bucket of icy cold water thrown over all the other nonsense in the broadsheets. You know, the silly recipes, the "ironic" stuff about Tom Cruise's baby, the advice to buy a second home in Romania, the ten page articles by women going through a personal crisis because they have to leave Max and India with that clueless little East European nanny when they go to their fifteen hours a day, 200K salary job ... what ARE Max and India going to learn from a clueless little East European girl when I could offer them so much more? ... but I LOVE my job ... but there's no time to bond with Max and India ... and I feel guilty about thinking the East European nanny is clueless, even though she is ... and I've got this ten page long article to finish ... yadda yadda.

I'm still not sure if Charlie boy adapts to television very well, and when I first started watching him there was something naggingly familiar which I couldn't pinpoint.

After a few weeks, it dawned on me. He has stolen all of his mannerisms from Michael Gambon playing Philip Marlow in The Singing Detective.

I still love The Singing Detective more than anything I've seen on television, being a middlebrow nerd. Once I watched the whole series three times in a row over the course of a month. I think I may have been having some sort of emotional breakdown at the time.

Anyway, Charlie Brooker must have studied it and has now taken on the persona of Philip Marlow: the bitterness; the put-on silly child's voice that Philip used to use in his interviews with Doctor Gibbon; the eyes moving about from side to side. It's uncanny. I hope he doesn't suffer from psoriasis as well.

Unless he is just acting for the cameras. In real life, he may be more like Keith Chegwin.

Just to disturb you even more, he also goes one further than Steve Davis, and looks like Steve Davis morphing into Mark Smith morphing into Jerry Sadowitz.

And he started this series watching the Fr*sties B*y advert - surely proof that S*rly G*rl is taking over the world ...

"Oh, great. This is never on" he deadpanned.

I hope that's enough colour and insight for you all.